A Song for Carmine

by M Spio

  “You got to let all of that go, boy. Life isn’t fair, honey, and there’s nothing I can say to you about that.” She’s rubbing the small of my back, and I can never remember her doing that. I am her baby again; I don’t want to be a man or a father or a widow, and I don’t want to move.

  She brings me a glass of water and a wet rag, which she places on the back of my neck, and it feels so good and so soothing that I put my hand on top of it and push on my neck to feel the coolness even deeper. I lean back on the sofa and blink a few times to clear my eyes, to push the rest of the tears down my face.

  “I’m serious, Ma. I don’t know how to be a father. I would hate to fail him. I am nothing without her; I don’t have anything to offer him without her to hold me up. See what I’m saying, Ma?” The feeling is starting to come back to my skin, and I look around at the clean house and how the drapes are wide-open and this room, once so dark, is so alive and my mom’s dress is yellow and not brown.

  “Carmine, you have your own light. You always did. For a long while, your pa and I shaded you with our own darkness, and then you did a good job of it yourself, but you have your own light. You do. It’s the only light your son needs to grow. We’ve got to get that baby home. You’ve got to take him to his home, and you’ve got to be his father.” She’s rocking on the sofa a little, remembering something.

  “You know son, life is nothing more than a series of choices. If you want to do right by that baby, by your son, you do one right thing at a time. You start by bringing him home, and the stuff you don’t know about him and how to take care of him, you learn, and you get up each day and you start over. You do one right thing at a time, boy, and it’ll be all right.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Z HAS SOME FAMILY in South Carolina that I need to call. I’ve been sitting in our bedroom for hours now, maybe days, the phone ringing off the hook, the hospital’s number popping up, my cell phone ringing with calls from Ma. I feel paralyzed, want to hold the pause button forever, wonder what would happen if I stay like this, in place.

  I hear a knock on the door, stop breathing for a second, imagine that it’s the police coming to get me, to finally punish me for all my wrongs, to tell me time has caught up with me, that all of this is really true.

  I sit there and the knocking gets louder, becomes a pounding. I stretch my legs and then get up. I hear ringing in my ears, hear the hum of the refrigerator; outside, Z’s wind chimes settle.

  When I open the door, a small man stands there, wearing a casual suit, looking straight at me. Behind him, I see the trash truck pass, the mailman across the street, life goes on. How could it?

  “Are you Carmine St. Clair?” His face is warm, his eyes tender; he reaches out his hand to shake mine.

  “I am,” I say quietly. I feel a chill slide up my spine and then back.

  “I’m from Eton Social Services. The hospital has called me because you’ve not held your son or made arrangements to pick him up. Is that true?” He’s holding a folder in his hand, a manila rectangular; a few yellow papers stick out.

  I look at him, don’t recognize him, can barely understand the words that escape his mouth.

  “Listen, Mr. St. Clair. I know your wife passed in childbirth and you must be in a real state of shock, but we’ve got to make some arrangements here…”

  “I need to sit down for a minute. I just need a minute here. Do you want to come in?” I turn around and walk toward the sofa, hear his quiet footsteps behind me.

  I sit on the soft and he sits on the other end, hands me his card.

  “As I was saying, your son is healthy, and the hospital normally only holds newborns twenty-four hours. It’s been three days now, and I need to know what your plans are.”

  “Did you ever go to a movie, get up to use the bathroom, get popcorn or a drink, and when you came back, you were lost? I mean, you miss one part, one key scene, and lose your grasp on the story? I mean never catch up. So when the end of the movie comes along, you aren’t really sure what happened? I mean, you don’t understand how what you missed changed everything you thought you knew.

  “I used to go to matinees in Dallas all the time—that’s where I used to live—and this seemed to happen to me all the time. I’d step away for just a few minutes—to make a phone call or take a piss—and that was all it took for me to lose it, I mean the story. I’d come out of the theater confused, feel ripped off. I mean, how can you miss one thing and lose it all? That’s how I feel now. How did I get here? From there? From bliss? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  He looks at me for a long time, like a child, searching my face for some kind of clue.

  “I think I know what you mean, sir, I think so. Life is funny like that; it doesn’t always make sense, the why or the what. But the fact remains that I need to know…”

  “I need to know, too. I need to know what I am supposed to do with a baby boy and a dead wife? What do you tell people in situations like this?” I rub my hands on the legs of my jeans until they are warm and I am sweating behind my ears.

  “I tell them that they’ve got to keep moving forward, that they can’t stop, that they need to focus on what means the most to them and do everything in their power. I need to know that you’ll do that, Carmine. I need to know that you’re going to pick up your baby and take good care of him. And if you’re not going to—well, I need to know that too. That’s why I’m here. What are you going to do?”

  * * *

  I get up and go to the small telephone table in the hallway. I find the address book with names and numbers of cousins and other relatives Z invited to the wedding. I don’t know these people much, and I have to tell them that they’ve lost a family member and gained one, too. All in the same breath.

  I start with A and call Aunt Marla first. When she answers, I can’t speak at first.

  “Hello? Hello?” Her voice searches the line.

  “Marla. I mean, Aunt Marla. Hello, this is Carmine, Carmine St. Clair. I’m Z’s husband. I’m calling to tell you…”

  “Yes, I remember you. Where’s Z? What’s wrong? I’ve been calling her for days now. Did she have the baby?”

  “She did, she did, and the baby is fine. He’s fine, he’s good, but Z, Z…” I choke on my words, try to spit them out, push them out of my mouth.

  “Speak up. What is it?” She’s yelling into the phone, and I can hear her mouth push against the receiver.

  I take a deep breath, try to finish, to complete the one sentence I’ve never spoken aloud.

  “Marla, oh god, Marla, I mean Aunt Marla, Z… she started to bleed really bad, I mean, she started to bleed at home and things went so fast and…”

  “Spit it out, boy!” She’s screaming into the phone now.

  “I don’t know what to do. I don’t…”

  “Tell me what’s wrong with my niece right now, or I will…”

  “She’s dead, Marla, she’s dead. She bled to death on the table while she delivered our son.” I yell it at her, get it out of me as fast as I can.

  “You’re lying, you’re lying to me. Z was so healthy and strong and…” I hear her sobbing now, a heavy, bulky kind of cry. It scares me.

  “It’s true. It’s true. She’s no longer with us.”

  “What did you do to her? How did this happen?” She’s taking short breaths on the other end of the line, hyperventilating. I pace the room and sweat.

  “The doctors said there was nothing they could do… that the bleeding disorder is rare and we couldn’t have known…”

  “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that. You. If she’d never gotten involved with some hick white man…”

  My legs fold beneath me and I fall to the floor. “Don’t say that… don’t say that!”

  I hang up the phone and ask Ma to call every third person on the list.

  * * *

  I leave the house just as the afternoon sun is starting to tuck behind the clouds and retire. I walk, but slowly this time, and I make the right
turn and the next thing I know, I’m standing at the nursery window again, watching my son twist and turn in his white sleeper, his fists clenched, his eyes bright, not an ounce of fear in them. I remember that her body is floors beneath us, but I also know that can’t be true of her spirit. “I’m always with you, baby, my love; it’s the only way it can be,” she’d always tell me as she explained that she’d felt we’d always been together, that it just took us awhile to realize that, to come home, and that it just wasn’t possible to leave that state ever. I pull the collar of my shirt up and I smell her so strongly in the fibers that I rest my head on my own shoulder while I watch him. He is so calm and so strong already, but I can’t bring myself to go in there, to stand before him just yet.

  I leave the hospital and the sky turns gray as I walk home, and then to black. When I get inside the door, I don’t turn on any lights or use the bathroom or breathe a lot, but just climb inside our bed, clothes and all, and wrap myself tightly in our sheets. My sleep is a big black envelope that blocks me from the world, from the truth.

  When I wake up in the morning, I step into a cold shower and stand still until my body adjusts to the harsh temperature. I stay under the water until my skin takes on a bluish tone and I’ve run the soap all over my face and my neck and I’ve cried and I’ve sat on the bottom of the tub like a child. When I step out, the same heaviness is on me, the same ugly truths, but I’m ready to put on a clean shirt and to tie my shoes one at a time and go to him. To stand up. I have failed at so much in my life, but I can’t fail at this. I cannot run from him.

  I load his car seat and I start the car and let it idle in the drive awhile. I try to remember ever holding a baby, ever—I don’t think I have. I’ve seen them in grocery stores and in church pews and on TV, but there has never been a single time that I’ve held one or looked into its small eyes. When Z was pregnant, I tried to imagine everything about my baby’s face: every fold of his skin and every newly formed reflex and the slate of his clean mind. When he began to kick in her womb, I placed my hand near the kick each and every time, taking him all in, letting my love for him, for her, consume me and melt every defense. I wanted to learn him, to study him, to understand the cycle of life, the human body, the essence of God. I’d just never imagined that I’d have to do it alone.

  Instead of driving straight to the hospital, I stop at a bookstore and buy every baby and parenting book I can find: The Baby Whisperer and Doctor Spock and others. Z had grown up with babies, had many nieces and nephews, promised to teach me all I would need to know. I’d planned to follow her lead, to learn by the unfolding of each day. Advertising and martini lunches and salesmanship cannot help me now.

  I grow excited as I drive, then angry, then panic takes over. What is this new world? What is this life? I remember Mom telling me about doing one right thing at a time. I feel Z’s voice vibrate in my mind, know she is there in some way. She has to be.

  When I get to the hospital, I am out of breath. I’ve spent the last few miles of the drive imagining my boy at various ages: a teenager, a wobbly toddler, an awkward boy of ten. An infant. I am alone.

  I park the car and sit in the driver’s seat and watch a couple leaving the hospital. The father. I watch him. I notice his movements. His hand on the small of his wife’s back, his hand firmly on the handle of the baby’s carrier. He sets the baby down by the car, pulls the blanket back from its face, smiles; he pulls from something way down deep. I watch as he leans into the backseat to buckle him into the car seat, how he closes the door gently, picks up the bag, and leads his tired wife to the passenger side, how he looks off into the horizon before getting in the car himself. I want to follow him home. I want to see how it’s done. I want to know it can be as easy as they make it look.

  I walk, nearly run, into the hospital, skipping up six flights of stairs when the elevator takes too long. I can feel something take over. I am no longer myself, the man I know; someone else has come to take his place. It’s a strange, hollow feeling, almost euphoric; I’ve got to move, I’ve got to chase it because I can’t lose.

  “I’m ready to take my son home. I want to take my son home.” I repeat myself at the first face I see at the nurse’s station. I don’t wait for an answer but run to the nursery glass to set my eyes on him. His bed is empty; adrenaline takes over.

  “I want my baby! Where is my goddamn baby?” I am pacing the halls and looking at each uniformed face, demanding to know where he is; everything has hit me at once—I can’t lose him too. I’ll never let him go, never walk away from him again. I start to run back to the nurse’s station, and they tell me to lower my voice, that my baby is fine, but I can’t calm myself; I need him in my arms now. When I pause to take a breath, I see a yellow-haired nurse coming up behind me pushing a small bed on wheels. Samuel is in it. My arms drop to my side.

  “Carmine, here is your son. He was being bathed. He’s been waiting for you awhile now.” She smiles and pushes the car toward me. I am standing in the middle of the hallway with my son and my wife is dead and the room begins to spin, so I push the bed to a nearby chair. I sit down and pull him close to me. His eyes are wide, and before I can stop it, he looks right at me. His eyes lock with mine, and I feel something come over me that is at first very frightening, and then calming and soothing, I know in that very instant: I am no longer who I was.

  When I take him into my arms, soft skin and all, we both let out a whimper, and I breathe so shallowly and take his small parts into my lungs and put his head and small body against my chest, on my shoulder, and I feel her: she is with us. I lean back in my chair and cry and laugh at the same time, and both hurt.

  CHAPTER 25

  WITHOUT THE LIGHT BEHIND her skin, Z’s brown skin looks dull and flat, like the pasty brown used in preschool projects and Spanish architecture. I hate this. I walk around the funeral home with an unsettling energy in my feet, pushing my shoes forward, my son on my shoulder; I’ve not left him or been more than a foot away from him since picking him up from the hospital. He breathes so softly under my chin; it is poetry, the sound of his living. His skin is so delicate and pink and light brown, the smell of him greater than anything I’ve ever gotten close to; there is something so big about him.

  I cannot sit still even long enough to answer the funeral director’s questions about the service and about who will speak and for how long and where the flowers should be placed or how many people will ride in the town car to the grave site. I just want him to quit talking. I want to walk out of the old and aging building and back home to my house, our house, and pretend that she will walk in the door at any moment. I just want to pretend a little longer.

  “Make it as simple and as beautiful and as quick as possible. That’s what I want. Make that happen.”

  He looks back at me, smiles quietly; his eyes blink a few times and he nods. He’s a small man, probably fell into this work, a family’s business maybe; his heart’s not in it. I feel sorry for him, but he’s good at this job, riding out people’s waves of emotion. I can be hard; I try to be easy on him.

  “I don’t much care about this part, but others will. Don’t let it stretch on too long—it hurts too much—but don’t rush it either. Play the calypso music I gave you at the end, run the slide show, usher us through it. Show us how it’s done. Can you do that?”

  “Of course, sir, of course. Don’t worry about a thing.” When I turn to leave, I think I see him wink at me out of the corner of his eye, his soft brown eye peeking from his thick lid. I wince. He doesn’t know me like that.

  Z’s family is sitting down in the main room, and their faces make all of this hard; the resemblance is so strong, especially in the eyes, and you cannot not look at someone’s eyes when you speak to them. They want to hold my baby, and the thought of the cold spot on my chest scares me; without my son, I’m afraid I’ll run down the street like a crazy, grieving husband, and then maybe they’ll take my baby from me.

  I try to smile when I see my old friends s
itting behind me wearing T-shirts and jeans, Griff looking solemn yet still jolly, Mark’s eyes red, his foot tapping, both with a mouth full of tobacco. My mother sits in the last row, empty chairs on each side of her; there are no other St. Clairs to help us grieve this loss, to help fill our rows and the big, looming space left by this and the other. We make eye contact and she smiles back at me, big but not happy. I remember how I used to look at her from the school bus window and feel comforted by her face. There she is again. I barely recognize the woman she has become since Pa’s death. Kindness, tenderness, love—it all seems to come so easily to her now that she’s free. I wonder if this is who she was all along, buried beneath the weight of Pa.

  Busloads of Z’s friends and family come out. A couple of Z’s cousins stand up and talk about spending summers with her, about her laugh and her playfulness and her genuine kindness and her enduring spirit; and when they are done, everyone looks to me. Part of me believes that anything I would say would take away from her, her life, what she meant, what she means. I find strength in my legs and walk up to the podium. My baby stirs.

  “I… I just want to say that I didn’t know life could be so good, so sweet. She taught me that. To just relax and to enjoy life and love the right way and… I’m so afraid I’ll forget, that somehow I’ll lose…” I start to choke, feel my knees grow weak beneath me, take a breath and hold it.

  “Thank you all for coming.” I stand there for a few minutes looking at everyone, pat my baby’s back as I take my seat. Pastor Stanley comes and takes my place and says some words from the Bible about death not really being death at all. I let out a big audible sigh because I don’t know if it’s true. I look around at others’ faces to see if it makes a difference for them. To see if they believe that once someone is there, they’re always there. This I want to believe. Z’s family comes to me, one by one, leaning into my neck for hugs, patting the baby’s back, crying big messy tears.